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Buffalo In BriefsKunz Goldman: keepin' it real ... dumbIan Murphy

Last week, it happened again: Mary Kunz Goldman wrote another column for the Buffalo News. Her underwhelming insight into local life has long been a reliable source of inspiring and powerful stupidity for all News readers. Whether relating the insipid details of her personal life, openly calling for municipal theocracy or a war-time embargo on freedom of expression, fabricating nonexistent pianos to spice up a story or subserviently rimming the president, Maryås imbecilic commentary has been a rock: something Buffalonians can count on, even in uncertain times.

Due in large part to the like-minded antipathy of local bloggers like Buffalopundit, whoås taken to bashing Buffaloås most criminally obtuse columnist on a regular basis, we at The BEAST have been lax in attacking our once pet target, resorting instead to silent prayers that sheåd trip and fall into a grain thresher. However, she has yet to die in some terrible and appropriate manner, and her latest ode to puerility is just too egregious to ignore. Buffalo's odd couple: Hertel and Elmwood, published on August 7, is as expected from this smooth brained suburbanite, an exercise in sheltered sentiment and dull conservative wit. But what struck us most were the opening paragraphs.

Last week, it happened again. An activist, complaining about the kaput Martin Luther King Park splash pads, told The News: "If this was on Hertel Avenue, if it was in the Elmwood area, this would have been taken care of.

Funny how Hertel and Elmwood are always lumped together.

Mary uses this activist quote from another Buffalo News piece (City not yet able to put full splash back in park from August 4, written by Deidre Williams) to decry the latest claims that Hertel and Elmwood arenåt as uniquely distinct as two snowflakes. Apparently this happens quite often and must be stopped.

The column rapidly devolves into a cutesy comparison piece which, it is clear, Goldman imagines to be clever and witty. But she just canåt resist letting her Coulter-friendly bias peek through:

On Hertel, you can walk to the theater and see a movie by Michael Moore or Al Gore. On Elmwood, you feel like you're in the movie.

Take that, dirty hippies! she must have quipped when she penned that zinger. The overall tone of the Goldman piece is, per usual, quasi-retarded and completely irrelevant. What is interesting is her willful trampling of the facts.

Without referencing the article Goldman quotes to catalyze her Caucasian outrage, even the most publicly-educated among us can see that the activistås point has to do with the second-class citizenship of blacks in our city and society as a whole, rather than a contrived comparison of two hip white Buffalo hoods. The quote Goldman cites has a subtext: Martin Luther King Jr. Park is on the east side where mostly black people live and if it were in a white part of town, the watery playground would have been fixed post haste. Maybe, maybe not but probably. If only this activist, Samuel Herbert, vice chairman of the Coalition to Save Martin Luther King Jr. Park, had just come out and said so in the Williamså piece, Goldman could then be called out as the deceitful cracker she is and run out of town. Fortunately for us, it turns out he did. Hereås the original quote from Williamså piece, with the part Goldman decided to excise in bold: